Editorial: Government must respect basic rights

Wednesday

Sep 27, 2017 at 5:20 AM

Since political adversaries are inclined to charge each other with endless scandals, it may be difficult to recall a particularly sobering development a few years ago involving the Internal Revenue Service. But, given the potential power of this agency to ruin citizens, it is a matter that should be fully explored.

Back in 2013, news emerged that the tax collecting agency had improperly targeted conservative-leaning nonprofit groups for extra scrutiny when they applied for tax-exempt status. Starting in 2010, organizations with phrases such as, for example, “Tea Party” or “Patriots” in their names came under unusually strict scrutiny. As a consequence, their applications for tax exempt status were held up for months, or even years, admitted Lois Lerner, then an official at the IRS. (Lerner retired after this matter came to light.)

That the IRS apparently treated conservatives differently — weakening their ability to engage in nonprofit speech as the 2012 campaign approached — should trouble Americans of all stripes.

We’ve never really gotten to the bottom of the case. IRS officials reported that emails had mysteriously gone missing and could not be retrieved; Lerner refused to answer Congress’s questions, claiming protection against self-incrimination; and we’ve never had the full, comprehensive story of how such a series of events took place. Unfortunately, if we are to avoid such encroachments on our liberty in the future, we need a detailed understanding of the chain of events that allowed the IRS’s inappropriate targeting to occur in the first place.

That may be about to change, finally. Last month, Judge Reggie B. Walton of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia ordered the IRS to release the names of employees involved in targeting conservative and Tea Party groups. The judge demanded information on why groups were targeted and requested additional records from May 2009 to March 2015. He gave the agency until Oct. 16 to come up with some names and some answers.

Judge Walton’s decision came as a response to a lawsuit by True the Vote, an advocacy group. Once the employees who were involved in the targeting are identified, True the Vote hopes to depose them to get a “full and complete picture” of what happened.

While it is troubling that getting the facts is taking so long, the judge’s action seems a salutary development. This is serious business. One of the impeachment charges against President Richard Nixon, who was forced to resign in 1974, was that he had tried to obtain confidential information about citizens from the IRS and to conduct tax investigations in a discriminatory manner.

In 2013, President Barack Obama declared that “The IRS must apply the law in a fair and impartial way, and its employees must act with utmost integrity ... [We must] hold those responsible for these failures accountable, and to make sure ... that such conduct never happens again.” He was right then. And his words still apply now.

- GateHouse Media

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